When Howard H. Stevenson was asked to revive Harvard Business School's neglected entrepreneurship program, the subject had no secure academic home. Stevenson, the professor and investor whose teaching helped move entrepreneurship into the mainstream of business education, died on September 26, 2026, at 85. Inc. reported that his longtime friend and collaborator Amar Bhidé confirmed the death.

The assignment that defined Stevenson's academic life began with a problem. In 1980, students wanted Harvard's Starting New Ventures course, but few faculty members considered entrepreneurship a sound scholarly path. Dean John McArthur believed the field needed a leader with intellectual credibility and practical judgment. Stevenson returned to HBS in 1982 as the first Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration and rebuilt the course as Entrepreneurial Management.

What followed was more than a new syllabus. Stevenson treated entrepreneurship as a way of acting, not a personality possessed by a gifted few. His compact definition, "the pursuit of opportunity beyond resources currently controlled," shifted attention from the founder's traits to the work of spotting an opening and assembling what was needed to pursue it. In a 2002 conversation published by Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, he put the teaching principle plainly: "First, entrepreneurship has been taught as a process, not as a person."

Stevenson built that principle into cases. He wrote more than 100 cases and notes centered on entrepreneurship as an ongoing discipline, and he chose protagonists across gender, race, age and career stage so that students could recognize the work as something they could undertake. He also argued that entrepreneurial behavior belonged inside mature institutions as well as startups. The result gave business schools a teachable framework and gave students practice making decisions with incomplete information, limited authority and resources they did not yet control.

His path to that work began far from Soldiers Field. Born in 1941, Stevenson moved with the postings of his father, a Navy officer, before the family settled in rural Holladay, Utah. As a teenager, he entered an early American Field Service overseas program and attended school in France without arriving with the language. A National Merit Scholarship took him to Stanford, where he studied mathematics and graduated in 1963. He earned an MBA from HBS in 1965 and a DBA in 1969.

Stevenson's first teaching and operating roles supplied the raw material for his later ideas. He taught Business Policy, spent time at a Boston investment bank, then returned to Harvard to teach real estate. Working with William Poorvu, he wrote more than 60 cases, created two real estate courses and helped establish a framework for a field that, like entrepreneurship, had struggled for academic standing. From 1978 to 1982, he worked at Preco Corporation as vice president of finance and administration, gaining an operator's view of budgets and accounts. Harvard Business School Alumni later traced his teaching philosophy to this combination of cases, deals and management experience.

He practiced the resourcefulness he taught. In 1982, Stevenson helped found the Baupost Group and served as its first president. He later spent nine years as a general partner, and the firm's assets had passed $400 million by the time he withdrew from active management. His movement between a classroom, a manufacturer and an investment partnership gave his scholarship an unusual test: the ideas had to work for people making commitments with real money and imperfect knowledge.

Harvard also drew on Stevenson as an institution builder. He served repeatedly as a senior associate dean, including responsibility for financial and information systems in the early 1990s and External Relations from 2001 to 2005. He chaired Harvard Business Publishing's board and served as Harvard's vice provost for resources and planning and senior associate provost in the mid-2000s. In one year of the HBS capital campaign, he made 277 individual alumni visits, applying the same attention to people and opportunity that animated his courses.

His public service extended beyond the university. Stevenson chaired NPR's board from 2008 to 2010 and served organizations in health care, conservation and the arts, including Mount Auburn Hospital, the Nature Conservancy, Sudbury Valley Trustees and the Boston Ballet. He and his wife, Fredi, also directed much of their giving quietly, often anonymously or in the names of people important to them, according to the Howard's Gift project. The pattern joined money to stewardship rather than display.

Stevenson wrote and collaborated across entrepreneurship, investing, fundraising and the meaning of success. His books included Just Enough, Make Your Own Luck, Getting to Giving and Wealth and Families. His influence also moved person to person. Bhidé, a former protege who became a Columbia professor, said after Stevenson's death, "Howard was who I wanted to be when I grew up." The remark captured the reach of a teacher whose generosity with ideas mattered alongside the ideas themselves.

The field Stevenson helped build now sits securely in business-school curricula, but its durable core remains practical: opportunity can be studied, judgment can be exercised, and resources can be assembled. His definition continues to give founders and managers a language for that work. At Harvard, the courses, cases and faculty community he developed continue the project he accepted in 1982, while Baupost, his books and generations of students carry the same discipline into organizations far beyond the classroom.